Getting the Make, Getting the Data: A Total Machine on Screen
As Koji watched Masataka land trick after astounding trick in rapid succession in the YouTube Sponsor Me video, he murmured in English, “Masa is a total machine” before lapsing back into focused silence.
This brief comment is dense in meanings around the energies and desires flowing through and around the skateboarding male body, about the vector of the visual and attendant spectacle, and about the mobility and mobilization of young people like Masataka within a historically specific matrix of social forces—a “social machine.”
The first machine is produced in the impossible performance of sequential and uninterrupted success created through Koji’s editing. 35 clips in less than 2 and a half minutes is a dizzying, ecstatic rush of chaotic events in which Masataka moves fast and deliberately towards, over, and down familiar street architecture made incomprehensible through Masataka’s skaterly transformation of their purpose into something dangerous, thrilling and unplaceable. In some shots the camera is static as in one scene in which the camera with a wide-angle lens points up a long set of stairs from the bottom. There is only a millisecond of stillness before Masataka appears and launches off the top stair, moving incredibly fast, descending past the camera that pans to track him as he clears the entire double set of stairs and rides away. In other, longer takes the camera pursues Masataka as he performs a series of tricks in quick succession, moving from obstacle to flat ground, never slowing as he engages yet another obstacle. The “machine” in this sense is one that repeats without failing, but it also points out the reformulation and compression of Masataka’s haptic presence in space into this frenzied ritual of the “make”—the landed trick that streams uninterrupted and can loop endlessly—a reformulation only possible through the circuits of video and editing software. It is the real intensified into an orgy of speed and risk precisely managed into relentless images of what Japanese skaters long for, the mei-ku or the trick completed in a unifying flow of energy—success repeated into a smooth ecstatic consistency across a shifting cityscape where the machine engages in a kind of ciné-trance that at once accumulates and occludes failure within the massive digital residue generated through the assemblage of videographer, camera, and skater.
The “make” is the exquisitely visible trace because of the repression of another aspect of Masataka’s machine-like performance: his persistent repetition of failure. Around each edited filmic event is a zone of failure excised as a new regime of disciplined truth is exerted over the spectacularized body. Koji’s hard drive becomes clotted with gigabytes of “failure” as Masataka bailed on trick after trick, attempt after attempt. This accumulation of cut footage is not surprising in the least. There is no chance that we might mistake the carefully selected and edited footage of the final video as “unreal” or “less true” because of the absence of failed attempts and falls. Indeed, the signs of the real are exhibited in movement, in Masataka’s intense contact with handrails, ledges, and streets in which the implicit risks of speed and bodily chaos are ever present. However, the repetition of failure surrounding each mei-ku is rendered invisible and so the serial crisis of the fall, injury, and trauma is deferred, kept out of circulation and in reserve as a weight of digital artifacts authenticating the few seconds of video onto which condenses the most intense spectacular value.
Seemingly impervious to the vicissitudes of gravity, Masataka endlessly makes his tricks through the machinic grace of Koji’s editing software. On-screen before us, he permanently averts skateboarding’s inevitable corporeal brutality—the total vertigo of what Caillios terms illinix, the most chaotic and nonsensical form of play, that most threatening to the corporeal body and to the social organization of that body. Each mei-ku edited together in a sequence of exquisite mei-ku in repetition banishes this vertigo and “prevent(s) it from being transformed into disorder and panic” (Caillois 144). Masataka is a “machine” that depends on other (scopic) machines to transform him and to produce a desirable object, one that alters the very practice of skateboarding.
It is necessary to point out that this short video is an attempt to attract capital heavily distributed and anchored throughout the youth culture/skateboard metropole of SoCal. The video is pleasurable, but it also congeals labor and represents an effort towards securing an economic future. Skateboarding on the streets of Japan is an innovative, improvisational practice where young men (and it is almost always men), many of whom are under-employed or out of work altogether, exert their bodily energies in play that reorganizes the meaning of capitalist urban space. At the same time skateboarding opens a new field of possibilities by generating new economic value within global youth culture in the face of Japan’s prolonged economic malaise. This possibility explains Koji’s excited attention to the view statistics on YouTube. As the number of hits climbed he got more excited, hoping the video would get Masataka noticed where being seen would have material results—in the skateboard industry networks situated in SoCal cities like Costa Mesa, Carlsbad, Irvine. A video like the one Koji produced is an economic product but also a form of self-representation synchronizing idealized visions of the potential city and the creative, autonomous skater. It articulates these two figures of youth and city within a global grammar of “youth culture” shaped by narratives created in a nexus of kids’ social realities and virutalities, ad agencies, video game companies and the worlds they design, branded extreme sports events, media networks, and underground companies like Lesque. This complex represents what Deleuze calls the “social machine” that “selects or assigns the technical elements used” (Deleuze 2007 70). In this sense then too, Masataka is “a total machine,” a component in the formation of the social. He is a critical body-in-motion and falls within the range of materials necessary to construct a visual field for the immediate social and economic spaces of Lesque and their aspirations to shape Japanese skate culture. To be more specific: Masataka is an active machine in producing the haptic experiences needed to authenticate and delineate a particular kind of skate practice capable of jumping scale, from the hardcore local spatiality where the authenticity of the Tokyo street is alchemized through painful wrecks, creativity, and bodily skill, to the global networks where legitimizing capital and media might become accessible. At the same time, Masataka is a target machine for Koji’s “seeing machine” comprised not only of the video camera but the entire assembly of software and relay platforms like YouTube—the digital membrane necessary for visual artifacts to pass into global circulation.
It occurs to ask, “What might be the effects of the repressed zone of failure upon the video and its social relations should it return?” I am more interested though in the absence of failure and how its “return” is intimated by the anthropologist’s second camera, like a shadowy second gunman well-placed to finish the job of capturing the fragmented components of the real. Koji and Masataka’s video does not for a moment undermine the subordinated relation between the world as object and the mechanical eye. The video works feverishly within a theater of truth Antonin Artaud would surely appreciate, emphasizing in its negative or excised space “effects that are immediate and painful—in a word,…Danger” (Artaud 42). This is the unseen space of “what could happen” coinciding precisely with what is visible on screen, the machined empire of facts, the unquestioned history of the mei-ku. Like Ranciere describing Chris Marker’s experimental documentary film The Last Bolshevik, Koji’s video echoes from the absented zone of failure: “The real must be fictionalized in order to be thought” (Ranciere 38). Having taken up Masataka’s labor in its entirety, and with failure contributing through its massive negative displacement to the value of the mei-ku, Koji creates a videographic identity lush with the movements and spaces of authentic skateboarding. It is an identity produced through both hard work and intense pleasures, a possession too dull, too painful, too intensely and briefly ecstatic, to be thought. It is only in the images of Masataka repeating themselves again and again on computer screens around the world that Koji can think into the real of viewing statistics that confirm his labor and serve to calibrate his next project.
This brief comment is dense in meanings around the energies and desires flowing through and around the skateboarding male body, about the vector of the visual and attendant spectacle, and about the mobility and mobilization of young people like Masataka within a historically specific matrix of social forces—a “social machine.”
The first machine is produced in the impossible performance of sequential and uninterrupted success created through Koji’s editing. 35 clips in less than 2 and a half minutes is a dizzying, ecstatic rush of chaotic events in which Masataka moves fast and deliberately towards, over, and down familiar street architecture made incomprehensible through Masataka’s skaterly transformation of their purpose into something dangerous, thrilling and unplaceable. In some shots the camera is static as in one scene in which the camera with a wide-angle lens points up a long set of stairs from the bottom. There is only a millisecond of stillness before Masataka appears and launches off the top stair, moving incredibly fast, descending past the camera that pans to track him as he clears the entire double set of stairs and rides away. In other, longer takes the camera pursues Masataka as he performs a series of tricks in quick succession, moving from obstacle to flat ground, never slowing as he engages yet another obstacle. The “machine” in this sense is one that repeats without failing, but it also points out the reformulation and compression of Masataka’s haptic presence in space into this frenzied ritual of the “make”—the landed trick that streams uninterrupted and can loop endlessly—a reformulation only possible through the circuits of video and editing software. It is the real intensified into an orgy of speed and risk precisely managed into relentless images of what Japanese skaters long for, the mei-ku or the trick completed in a unifying flow of energy—success repeated into a smooth ecstatic consistency across a shifting cityscape where the machine engages in a kind of ciné-trance that at once accumulates and occludes failure within the massive digital residue generated through the assemblage of videographer, camera, and skater.
The “make” is the exquisitely visible trace because of the repression of another aspect of Masataka’s machine-like performance: his persistent repetition of failure. Around each edited filmic event is a zone of failure excised as a new regime of disciplined truth is exerted over the spectacularized body. Koji’s hard drive becomes clotted with gigabytes of “failure” as Masataka bailed on trick after trick, attempt after attempt. This accumulation of cut footage is not surprising in the least. There is no chance that we might mistake the carefully selected and edited footage of the final video as “unreal” or “less true” because of the absence of failed attempts and falls. Indeed, the signs of the real are exhibited in movement, in Masataka’s intense contact with handrails, ledges, and streets in which the implicit risks of speed and bodily chaos are ever present. However, the repetition of failure surrounding each mei-ku is rendered invisible and so the serial crisis of the fall, injury, and trauma is deferred, kept out of circulation and in reserve as a weight of digital artifacts authenticating the few seconds of video onto which condenses the most intense spectacular value.
Seemingly impervious to the vicissitudes of gravity, Masataka endlessly makes his tricks through the machinic grace of Koji’s editing software. On-screen before us, he permanently averts skateboarding’s inevitable corporeal brutality—the total vertigo of what Caillios terms illinix, the most chaotic and nonsensical form of play, that most threatening to the corporeal body and to the social organization of that body. Each mei-ku edited together in a sequence of exquisite mei-ku in repetition banishes this vertigo and “prevent(s) it from being transformed into disorder and panic” (Caillois 144). Masataka is a “machine” that depends on other (scopic) machines to transform him and to produce a desirable object, one that alters the very practice of skateboarding.
It is necessary to point out that this short video is an attempt to attract capital heavily distributed and anchored throughout the youth culture/skateboard metropole of SoCal. The video is pleasurable, but it also congeals labor and represents an effort towards securing an economic future. Skateboarding on the streets of Japan is an innovative, improvisational practice where young men (and it is almost always men), many of whom are under-employed or out of work altogether, exert their bodily energies in play that reorganizes the meaning of capitalist urban space. At the same time skateboarding opens a new field of possibilities by generating new economic value within global youth culture in the face of Japan’s prolonged economic malaise. This possibility explains Koji’s excited attention to the view statistics on YouTube. As the number of hits climbed he got more excited, hoping the video would get Masataka noticed where being seen would have material results—in the skateboard industry networks situated in SoCal cities like Costa Mesa, Carlsbad, Irvine. A video like the one Koji produced is an economic product but also a form of self-representation synchronizing idealized visions of the potential city and the creative, autonomous skater. It articulates these two figures of youth and city within a global grammar of “youth culture” shaped by narratives created in a nexus of kids’ social realities and virutalities, ad agencies, video game companies and the worlds they design, branded extreme sports events, media networks, and underground companies like Lesque. This complex represents what Deleuze calls the “social machine” that “selects or assigns the technical elements used” (Deleuze 2007 70). In this sense then too, Masataka is “a total machine,” a component in the formation of the social. He is a critical body-in-motion and falls within the range of materials necessary to construct a visual field for the immediate social and economic spaces of Lesque and their aspirations to shape Japanese skate culture. To be more specific: Masataka is an active machine in producing the haptic experiences needed to authenticate and delineate a particular kind of skate practice capable of jumping scale, from the hardcore local spatiality where the authenticity of the Tokyo street is alchemized through painful wrecks, creativity, and bodily skill, to the global networks where legitimizing capital and media might become accessible. At the same time, Masataka is a target machine for Koji’s “seeing machine” comprised not only of the video camera but the entire assembly of software and relay platforms like YouTube—the digital membrane necessary for visual artifacts to pass into global circulation.
It occurs to ask, “What might be the effects of the repressed zone of failure upon the video and its social relations should it return?” I am more interested though in the absence of failure and how its “return” is intimated by the anthropologist’s second camera, like a shadowy second gunman well-placed to finish the job of capturing the fragmented components of the real. Koji and Masataka’s video does not for a moment undermine the subordinated relation between the world as object and the mechanical eye. The video works feverishly within a theater of truth Antonin Artaud would surely appreciate, emphasizing in its negative or excised space “effects that are immediate and painful—in a word,…Danger” (Artaud 42). This is the unseen space of “what could happen” coinciding precisely with what is visible on screen, the machined empire of facts, the unquestioned history of the mei-ku. Like Ranciere describing Chris Marker’s experimental documentary film The Last Bolshevik, Koji’s video echoes from the absented zone of failure: “The real must be fictionalized in order to be thought” (Ranciere 38). Having taken up Masataka’s labor in its entirety, and with failure contributing through its massive negative displacement to the value of the mei-ku, Koji creates a videographic identity lush with the movements and spaces of authentic skateboarding. It is an identity produced through both hard work and intense pleasures, a possession too dull, too painful, too intensely and briefly ecstatic, to be thought. It is only in the images of Masataka repeating themselves again and again on computer screens around the world that Koji can think into the real of viewing statistics that confirm his labor and serve to calibrate his next project.
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